A writing professor haunted by mysteries in her past—and by moths, bridges, unfinished student stories, and her husband’s lover’s nightguard—returns to the scene of her parents’ deaths.

In 2011 Susan Coll routinely walked Reno Road. At the time, her marriage of almost 30 years was breaking up. And she was reading a lot of memoirs by women who’d gone through their own major life crises.

Susan Coll was already an established novelist when she started working at Politics and Prose in 2011, and she promised the store’s owners that she wouldn’t write some kind of comic behind-the-scenes account of the beloved Connecticut Avenue shop. Oops. “I assured them that was not my intention,” says Coll, who ran the store’s programming and author events. “It truly was not! It just happened.”